Zipline is scaling up drone delivery to make vital medical supplies available on demand to anybody, 7 days a week, regardless of where they live. We design, manufacture, and operate our own fleet of autonomous drones, all the ground-based equipment that supports flight, and numerous cloud services to tie it all together. Today, we fly the equivalent of once around Earth’s equator every day, and about 25 million people in three countries have access to our services. Our mission is to serve all people equally, which requires scaling up to operate in every country around the world.

The Spatial Planning Team is responsible for generating pre-planned flight routes that our drones follow to safely navigate from a distribution center to each delivery site. We build and maintain systems for path planning and validation over geographic data aggregated from a variety of sources. We use these tools to measure and manage risk and ensure regulatory compliance in each jurisdiction.

As Zipline grows, the imperatives of scale are driving the development of robust systems that enable distributed teams to manage geographic data around the world. We analyze the accuracy of elevation models, estimate and track the completeness of ground feature datasets, evaluate the impact of new distribution centers, model an evolving regulatory landscape, and keep everything up-to-date as time passes and the world changes around us.

What You'll Do

In this role you will work on a small team responsible for our geodata management tools and the data itself. You’ll work with teammates around the world who are using these tools to establish our operations in new countries, answering questions like where can we fly, who can we serve, and how do we manage risk. As we work to accelerate expansion to serve all people equally, you’ll collaborate with engineers mostly in California to build out an increasingly scalable global system of geodatabases with APIs and User Interfaces on top of it.

Core elements of our stack today include Python, PostGIS, GDAL, Shapely, Flask, React and Cesium JS, and AWS. We also lean heavily on ArcGIS and QGIS.

What You'll Bring

• Experience shipping and maintaining production software
• A safety mindset and an understanding of best practices for testing and validating software and data
• Experience with geographic information systems, geographic data, and the open source ecosystem for geospatial data analysis, for example PostGIS and GDAL
• Experience building cloud backend software at scale
• Comfort working with a geographically distributed team, either from our office in South San Francisco or remotely
• A mindset of customer obsession and an enthusiasm to continuously iterate on your solutions in close collaboration with your users
• Skills turning complex and vague problems into organized and practical solutions, and then implementing and continuously improving them
• A commitment to work with your peers with empathy and compassion, enabling the team to develop skills and grow together
• A unique perspective cultivated by a diversity of life and career experiences that brings an innovative and refreshing spirit to our team.
• Nice to have: research experience conducting analysis to draw conclusions from incomplete data.

What Else You Need to Know